Chapter XI. At the Age of Eighteen
Venus toute entitre a sa proie attachie
I meant to write nothing but the truth in these pages, yet now I'm conscious that my memory has played a trick on me. It is in an artist what painters call foreshortening: events, that is, which took months to happen, it crushes together into days, passing, so to speak, from mountain top to mountain top of feeling, and so the effect of passion is heightened by the partial elimination of time. I can do nothing more than warn my readers that in reality some of the love-passages I shall describe were separated by weeks and sometimes by months, that the nuggets of gold were occasional «finds» in a desert. After all, it cannot matter to my «gentle readers,» and my good readers will have already divined the fact, that when you crush eighteen years into nine chapters, you must leave out all sorts of minor happenings while recording chiefly the important-fortunately these carry the message. It was with my knowledge as with my passions. Day after day I worked feverishly: whenever I met a passage such as the building of the bridge in Caesar, I refused to burden my memory with the dozens of new words because I thought, and still think, Latin comparatively unimportant: the nearest to a great man the Latins ever produced being Tacitus or Lucretius. No sensible person would take the trouble to master a language in order to gain acquaintance with the second-rate. But new words in Greek were precious to me like new words in English, and I used to memorize every passage studded with them, save choruses like that of the birds in Aristophanes, where he names birds unfamiliar to me in life.
Smith, I found, knew all such words in both languages. I asked him one day and he admitted that he had read everything in ancient Greek, following the example of Hermann, the famous German scholar, and he believed he knew almost every word. I did not desire any such pedantic perfection. I make no pretension to scholarship of any sort, and indeed learning of any kind leaves me indifferent, unless it leads to a fuller understanding of beauty, or that widening of the spirit by sympathy that is another name for wisdom. But what I wish to emphasize here is that in the first year with Smith I learned by heart dozens of choruses from the Greek dramatists and the whole of the Apologia and Crito of Plato, having guessed then, and still believe, that the Crito is a model short story, more important than any of even Plato's speculations. Plato and Sophocles! It was worthwhile spending five years of hard labor to enter into their intimacy and make them sister-spirits of one's soul. Didn't Sophocles give me Antigone, the prototype of the new woman for all time, in her sacred rebellion against hindering laws and thwarting conventions, the eternal model of that dauntless assertion of love that is beyond and above sex, the very heart of the divine! And the Socrates of Plato led me to that high place where man becomes God, having learned obedience to law and the cheerful acceptance of death; but even there I needed Antigone, the twin sister of Bazaroff, at least as much, realizing intuitively that my life-work, too, would be chiefly in revolt, and that the punishment Socrates suffered and Antigone dared would almost certainly be mine; for I was fated to meet worse opponents; after all, Creon was only stupid, whereas Sir Thomas Horridge was malevolent to boot, and Woodrow Wilson unspeakable! Again I am outrunning my story by half a century! But in what I have written of Sophocles and Plato the reader will divine, I hope, my intense love and admiration for Smith, who led me, as Vergil led Dante, into the ideal world that surrounds our earth as with illimitable spaces of purple sky, wind-swept and star-sown! If I could tell what Smith's daily companionship now did for me, I would hardly need to write this book; for, like all I have written, some of the best of it belongs as much to him as to me. In his presence for the first year and a half I was merely a sponge, absorbing now this truth, now that, hardly conscious of an original impulse. Yet all the time, too, as will be seen, I was advising him and helping him from my knowledge of life. Our relation was really rather that of a small, practical husband with some wise and infinitely learned Aspasialt I want to say here in contempt of probability that in all our years of intimacy, living together for over three years side by side, I never found a fault in him of character or of sympathy, save the one that drew him to his death.
Now I must leave him for the moment and turn again to Mrs.
May-hew. Of course, I went to her that next afternoon even before three. She met me without a word, so gravely that I did not even kiss her, but began explaining what Smith was to me and how I could not do enough for him who was everything to my mind, as she was (God help me!) to my heart and body; and I kissed her cold lips, while she shook her head sadly. «We have a sixth sense, we women, when we are in love,» she began. «I feel a new influence in you; I scent danger in the air you bring with you: don't ask me to explain: I can't; but my heart is heavy and cold as death. If you leave me, there'll be a catastrophe: the fall from such a height of happiness must be fatal.
If you can feel pleasure away from me, you no longer love me. I feel none except in having you, seeing you, thinking of you – none! Oh, why can't you love like a woman loves! No! like I love: it would be heaven; for you and you alone satisfy the insatiable; you leave me bathed in bliss, sighing with satisfaction, happy as the Queen in Heaven!» «I have much to tell you, new things to say,» I began in haste. «Come upstairs,» I broke in, interrupting myself. «I want to see you as you are now, with the color in your cheeks, the light in your eyes, the vibration in your voice, come!» And she came like a sad sybil. «Who gave you the tact,» she began while we were undressing, «the tact to praise always?» I seized her and stood naked against her, body to body. «What new things have you to tell me?» I asked, lifting her into the bed and getting in beside her, cuddling up to her warmer body. «There's always something new in my love,» she cried, cupping my face with her slim hands and taking my lips with hers. «Oh, how I desired you yesternoon, for I took the letter to your house myself and heard you talking in your room, perhaps with Smith,» she added, sounding my eyes with hers. «I'm longing to believe it; but, when I heard your voice, or imagined I did, I felt the lips of my sex open and shut and then it began to burn and itch intolerably. I was on the point of going in to you, but, instead, turned and hurried away, raging at you and at myself-»
«I will not let you even talk such treason,» I cried, separating her soft thighs, as I spoke, and sliding between them. In a moment my sex was in her and we were one body, while I drew it out slowly and then pushed it in again, her naked body straining to mine. «Oh,» she cried, «as you draw out, my heart follows your sex in fear of losing it and as you push in again, it opens wide in ecstasy and wants you all, all-» and she kissed me with hot lips. «Here is something new,» she exclaimed, «food for your vanity from my love! Mad as you make me with your love-thrusts, for at one moment I am hot and dry with desire, the next moment wet with passion, bathed in love, I could live with you all my life without having you, if you wished it, or if it would do you good. Do you believe me?» «Yes,» I replied, continuing the love-game, but occasionally withdrawing to rub her clitoris with my sex and then slowly burying him in her cunt again to the hilt. «We women have no souls but love,» she said faintly, her eyes dying as she spoke. «I torture myself to think of some new pleasure for you, and yet you'll leave me, I feel you will, for some silly girl who can't feel a tithe of what I feel or give you what I give-» She began here to breathe quickly. «I've been thinking how to give you more pleasure; let me try. Your seed, darling, is dear to me:
I don't want it in my sex; I want to feel you thrill and so I want your sex in my mouth, I want to drink your essence and I will-» and suiting the action to the word, she slipped down in the bed and took my sex in her mouth and began rubbing it up and down till my seed spirted in long jets, filling her mouth while she swallowed it greedily. «Now do I love you, Sir!» she exclaimed, drawing herself upon me again and nestling against me. «Wait till some girl does that to you and you'll know she loves you to distraction or, better still, to self-destruction.» «Why do you talk of any other girl?» I chided her. «I don't imagine you going with another man; why should you torment yourself just as causelessly?» She shook her head. «My fears are prophetic,» she sighed. «I'm willing to believe it hasn't happened yet, though-Ah, God, the torturing thought! The mere dread of you going with another drives me crazy; I could kill her, the bitch: why doesn't she get a man of her own? How dare she even look at you?» and she clasped me tightly to her. Nothing loath, I pushed my sex into her again and began the slow movement that excited her so quickly and me so gradually for, even while using my skill to give her the utmost pleasure, I could not help comparing and I realized surely enough that Kate's pussy was smaller and firmer and gave me infinitely more pleasure; still I kept on for her delight. And now again she began to pant and choke and, as I continued ploughing her body and touching her womb with every slow thrust, she began to cry inarticulately with little short cries growing higher in intensity till suddenly she squealed like a shot rabbit and then shrieked with laughter, breaking down in a storm of sighs and sobs and floods of tears. As usual, her intensity chilled me a little; for her paroxysm aroused no corresponding heat in me, tending even to check my pleasure by the funny, irregular movements she made. Suddenly, I heard steps going away from the door, light, stealing steps: who could it be? The servant? or-? Lorna had heard them, too, and though still panting and swallowing convulsively, she listened intently, while her great eyes wandered in thought. I knew I could leave the riddle to her: it was my task to reassure and caress her. I got up and went over to the open window for a breath of air and suddenly I saw Lily run quickly across the grass and disappear in the next house: so she was the listener! When I recalled Lorna's gasping cries, I smiled to myself. If Lily tried to explain them to herself, she would have an uneasy hour, I guessed. When Lorna had dressed, and she dressed quickly and went downstairs hastily to convince herself, I think, that her darky had not spied on her, I waited in the sitting room. I must warn Lorna that my «studies" would only allow me to give one day a week to our pleasures. «Oh,» she cried, turning pale as I explained, «didn't I know it!» «But Lorna,» I pleaded, «didn't you say you could do without me altogether if 'twas for my good?»